Robert Zelnick Journalism Prof, Boston University, Research Fellow, Hoover :
As the 1980 New Hampshire presidential primary approached, Ronald Reagan appeared to be in some trouble. He had lost the Iowa caucus to George H.W. Bush and the two were neck-and-neck in the Granite State with Reagan appearing to age with each appearance. True, there had been a nasty little incident in Nashua where Bush had seemed prickly in objecting to the inclusion of other candidates in his debate with Reagan. Still, he was so confident of victory that he left the state the weekend before Tuesday's vote, trusting his well-oiled organization to get his supporters to the polls. Result: a comfortable victory for Reagan and an unobstructed path to the nomination.
Not long afterward I ran into Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin. "It looks like Nashua turned it around for you," I said.
"Nashua had nothing to do with it," he replied."It was the first debate that won it. The folks here were moved by Reagan's simple conservative formulation of issues. Our tracking polls showed a small gain right after the debate. And it just kept growing and growing."
Tracking polls were used by every campaign that could afford them. The numbers sampled are pretty small; the results usually fall outside the margin of error of the standard polls. But when used intelligently, they are a low-cost way of telling a candidate where things are headed and sometimes why.
Wirthlin and I struck a deal that day. He would give me the results of his tracking polls whenever I needed them. I would give him an early read on primary and election days of how our exit polls were going.
Just as I trusted Wirthlin, and other craftsmen -- Bob Teeter and Peter Hart to name two -- I came to distrust pollsters who exaggerated the importance of any sampling that was theirs or whose methodology could not come close to supporting the conclusions they were inferring from their work. Most of the "mistakes" committed during this past Election Day were a function of the sampling techniques employed rather than huge late changes in the intentions of those likely to vote.
Not to mention occasional efforts of pollsters to become spinsters on behalf of a lagging campaign.